Do you use distributed version control?

Question

I\'d like to hear from people who are using distributed version control (aka distributed revision control, decentralized version control) and how they are finding it. What a

Answer 1

I've used bazaar for a little while now and love it. Trivial branching and merging back in give great confidence in using branches as they should be used. (I know that central vcs tools should allow this, but the common ones including subversion don't allow this easily).

bzr supports quite a few different workflows from solo, through working as a centralised repository to fully distributed. With each branch (for a developer or a feature) able to be merged independently, code reviews can be done on a per branch basis.

bzr also has a great plugin (bzr-svn) allowing you to work with a subversion repository. You can make a copy of the svn repo (which initially takes a while as it fetches the entire history for your local repo). You can then make branches for different features. If you want to do a quick fix to the trunk while half way through your feature, you can make an extra branch, work in that, and then merge back to trunk, leaving your half done feature untouched and outside of trunk. Wonderful. Working against subversion has been my main use so far.

Note I've only used it on Linux, and mostly from the command line, though it is meant to work well on other platforms, has GUIs such as TortoiseBZR and a lot of work is being done on integration with IDEs and the like.